EuroMed Rights strongly condemns the escalation of measures taken on Thursday 26 May against Mohamed Zaree, Egypt Office Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), and Rawda Ahmed, a leading Egyptian human rights activist and lawyer at Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), both EuroMed Rights member organisations.
EuroMed Rights denounces such arbitrary and illegitimate practices to curb democracy and human rights that have become daily occurrences in Egypt.
Cairo airport officials informed Mohamed Zaree about his travel ban on Thursday. This ban is based on an order sent to the airport officials by an investigations judge on Wednesday.
The airport authorities did not appear to know the case number or the name of the investigating judge. The ban is believed to be ordered in the framework of the reopened case against a number of nongovernmental organisations, known as the “foreign funding case”.
EuroMed rights fears that Zaree might be summoned for investigation and referred to trial for charges of “illegal” receipt of foreign funding in order to harm the country, as well as possible terrorism charges, for which he would incur up to 15 years’ imprisonment.
ANHRI 
lawyer Rawda Ahmed was summoned on Thursday 26 May at the office of the investigative judge in the same case, where she appeared with a number of lawyers. She was told to wait for two or three hours, in spite of the fact that she is five-months pregnant. She was later told that the investigation had been postponed.
These two events come in a context of continued crackdown against independent human rights organisations in Egypt. The foreign funding case involves, amongst others, CIHRS, Nazra for Feminist Studies and the Andalus Institute for Tolerance & Anti-violence Studies (AITAS).
The accusation of having received foreign funds illegally, would mean he’d be subjected to an imminent freeze of his personal assets. Such a measure could be used to attempt to cut off funding to the CIHRS in Egypt.